Quote Originally Posted by RandyRemington
Maybe chimerism is fairly common in ball pythons and we are just now seeing the evidence as we start to produce mixed type clutches.
10's of thousands of ball pythons are exported from Africa every year and have been for the last 10 years ... due to the ball python "craze", every one of these has been scrutinized for abnormalities by tons of people ... if it was "fairly common", we would know it ... the reality is that it's limited to a small number of captive breedings a year.

I'm just not a big fan of the "least likely theory" approach ... I would much rather focus the limited resources we have on pursuing the "most likely theory" until every possibility of that theory is exhausted and then move on to the next "most likely theory" ... seems a lot smarter to me than spinning wheels over things that in many cases can't even be proven if they are true ... I was always taught that good science is using the process of attempting to eliminate likely possibilities in pursuit of the truth ... but hey, that's just me.

-adam